Fred Wertheimer is founder and president of Democracy 21, a nonpartisan organization promoting campaign finance transparency and reform.

Exactly four years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court changed the landscape of American politics—and in ways we have yet to understand fully. In its 5-to-4 decision in Citizens United v. FEC, the court struck down the longstanding ban on corporate expenditures in federal elections, a move that reversed its position on how corporate money enters the political system and created new avenues for corrupting our government.

Today individual Americans are allowed to contribute only $2,600 per election to a federal candidate. Corporations, for their part, are prohibited from giving money directly to office-seekers. The Supreme Court didn’t change those facts, but its ruling made them far less relevant. The decision opened the door for anybody—individuals, corporations, interests groups—to give unlimited contributions to groups that then do the spending to influence federal elections. In effect, the donors and candidates are now allowed to circumvent the contribution limits.

Story Continued Below

The results have already been striking: During the 2012 election cycle, super PACs, tax-exempt nonprofit organizations and businesses spent more than $1 billion, including more than $300 million contributed by donors whose identities were never disclosed. This represented three times as much spending by outside groups as in either the 2008 or the 2010 election. In 2012, just 100 of the wealthiest people in America gave $339,490,176 to super PACs, or an average contribution of $3.4 million per donor, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

The unlimited contributions, the secret money and the corporate cash washing into our politics returns us to a system that existed before the reforms enacted by Congress after the Watergate scandal—an era when government decisions could be routinely purchased with campaign contributions. (Overriding the objections of his Department of Agriculture, President Richard Nixon, for example, ordered the increase of dairy prices shortly after the industry gave $2 million to his 1972 reelection committee.)

And the bad situation could be made worse. In October, the Supreme Court heard arguments in another case— McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission—that involves a challenge to the limits on the total contributions a donor can make to federal candidates and party committees in a two-year election cycle. If the Supreme Court strikes down these contribution limits, upheld by the court in 1976, we could well institute a system of legalized bribery—one where officeholders could solicit for their party $1 million contributions from influence-seeking donors, and then have the party spend the cash on their campaigns.

Amid the flood of cash threatening to corrupt the system, an opportunity now exists to make major changes to our campaign finance process. After all, it’s historically been the moments when money is most threatening our politics that Americans have seized the chance to make a change.

***

The corrupting evils of money in politics threatened even the Roman Republic, as far back as the first century, when the ancient historian Plutarch noted that “buying and selling votes crept in and money began to play an important part in determining the elections.” In the United States, by the gilded-age period of the late 19th century, corporate money had became so intrusive that senators were jokingly referred to by the companies that supported them, rather than the states they represented—as in “the senator from Standard Oil” or his colleague, “the senator from Union Pacific.”

Elihu Root, who later became the U.S secretary of state, addressed the Constitutional Convention of New York State on the scourge of corporate money in 1894, saying it was doing “more to shake the confidence of the plain people of small means in our political institutions than any other practice which has ever obtained since the foundation of our government.”

Root called for an end to “the giving of $50,000 or $100,000 by a great corporation toward political purposes, upon the understanding that a debt is created” to the corporation in return for the money. The crisis and the call for reform led eventually to a measure pushed by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907 to ban corporate contributions to federal candidates and political parties—a ban that still exists today, though, of course, it has been weakened by the Citizens United decision.

Money in politics is a cyclical issue. The cycle consists of scandals, followed by new laws, followed by those laws breaking down after a period of effectiveness, followed by new scandals—which in turn beget new laws. Thus, the response to the historic campaign finance abuses of the Watergate era was the landmark campaign finance reform legislation enacted in 1974. In addition to disclosure requirements, the law established limits on contributions from individuals to candidates and parties and created a public financing system for presidential elections that made funds available to candidates who agreed to limit spending. (The presidential financing system worked well for the nation and candidates of both parties for more than two decades.)

From the outset, efforts arose to curtail the contribution limits, but in 1976 the Supreme Court found that they were necessary “to deal with the reality or appearance of corruption inherent in a system permitting unlimited financial contributions.” Unlimited or very large contributions, the court reasoned, created an inherently corrupt system.

Of course, reforms can never solve all problems or anticipate all consequences. The failure to have an effective enforcement agency for the laws opened the door to abuses. For example, the explosive growth in the 1990s of “soft money”—donations unfettered by limits that are made not to a candidate, but to a candidate’s party, which then spends on the candidate’s behalf. Ironically, the loophole that allowed for this was created by flawed regulations issued by the Federal Election Commission, the agency that is supposed to enforce the laws. Congress put an end to this practice with a reform measure in 2002, but not before the spirit of the era was captured colorfully by Johnny Chung, an influence-seeking businessman who, in the late 1990s, gave $366,000 to the Democratic Party. “The White House is like a subway,” Chung said. “You have to put in coins to open the gates.”

Supporters of such a system perhaps wouldn’t all use Chung’s analogy, but they do argue that corporations, wealthy individuals and other donors have First Amendment free speech rights to give as much money as they want to candidates and parties. They agree with Justice Anthony Kennedy who, in 2009, authored the majority opinion in Citizens United and wrote that there is nothing wrong with money being used to buy “influence over or access to elected officials.”